


Roads Unraveled

by ConstanceComment



Category: League of Legends
Genre: 5+1 Things, Alternate Canon, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Betrayal, Blood and Gore, Canon Backstory, Fix-It, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, M/M, Major Character Undeath, Not A Fix-It, POV Second Person, Rare Pairings, Temporary Character Death, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-26
Updated: 2013-12-14
Packaged: 2018-01-02 18:04:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 12,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1059873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ConstanceComment/pseuds/ConstanceComment
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All magic comes with a price. Six possible timelines for Twisted Fate and Graves, five that could have happened instead of canon, and one that could come after.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Paid in Blood

**Author's Note:**

> God, writing for a rare pair. Why am I doing this to myself. Oh wait, no. I already do this. A lot. Just. Not so much pairs as OT3s ahahaha _whoops_. Other people have written for this pair, but not many. Surprisingly, FF.net has what you're looking for if you want it. I myself will never again descend into the Pit of Voles and post there. But I will occasionally lurk, if desperate enough. This is a pairing that makes me desperate enough.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You don’t wonder, Twisted Fate, about the ways this could have happened. There’s no point in examining the pasts that never were, the futures you have squandered. You did what you had to in order to get what you wanted. You knew the stakes. You both did.

1 (Magnificent)

In a world where you can feel it at all, how long does it take for guilt to eat you? A year, two years, three? Certainly no more than that. Every heist made easy, every escape rendered an afterthought widens the hole that sits at the bottom of your stomach, the uneasy place that makes it hard for you to sleep at night, that makes the food in your mouth taste like ash. You keep turning to the place on your left where he used to stand, ready with a quick draw, ready to hash out the next of your plans, ready to power a quick escape with gunfire.

It takes you three months, Twisted Fate, to learn the location of Priggs’s prison. It takes you another week to learn the exact location of Graves’s cell. You practice gating for two nights, visualizing the space that he has for so long inhabited, and try your best not to imagine him there as well, starved and wasting from whatever is done to men who remain incarcerated for so long as he has. You think several times of simply turning away. Continuing to move on. But you’ve never been particularly good at cutting your losses, only having learned to cut and run when it involved someone else’s purse.

When you gate into the cell, he looks up at you and his grin is tired, but he still looks as strong as ever, if thinner now, his muscles still evident after so long. His clothes fit poorly on his frame nonetheless, revealing scars that cover his arms, his legs, his face. But his eyes are still sharp; he doesn’t need your help to stand.

“What took you so long?” Is the first thing he asks. You, always ready with a quip, find that you are silent. “What happened to your eyes?” Is his next question, and that you do have an answer for, that question you do know how to field.

“Magic,” you answer, and your grin must be tired too, but if so, he does not mention it, watching as you levitate your cards, as you let them ring you in an easy display of your powers.

“Fancy,” he snorts, and when you hold out you hand, it's clear he trusts you, he still trusts you. Priggs must not have told him, you realize, why has no one told him—

Exiting the prison is almost as much work as having entered it. You are unable to teleport so soon after your last jump, much less take a passenger with you, and as such, your flight from the place is a difficult thing, filled with gunfire and shouting. Graves fights like his body is still mostly under his command as you make your way through the halls. In one room of Priggs’s laboratory-cum-hellhole, Graves finds an old gunsmith and a ridiculously oversized shotgun, one that Graves takes in hand as if it were meant to fit there.

On your way out, you leave the warehouse and your small parcel of Zaun in flames, glowing in the distance as the two of you steal your way across the city’s border. Graves leans on your shoulder as you clear through the streets, exhaustion catching up to the both of you as the adrenaline begins to leave your system. He’s still a heavy bastard, but the weight of his faith in you is far more crushing.

“I knew you were going to show up eventually,” he rumbles when you install him in a Piltover inn hours later, the both of you on your last legs after a night of running. He falls asleep while you watch him, and you are paralyzed with fear that he will learn, somehow, from your perfectly neutral face that you are responsible for his fate.

For a time, you fool yourself into believing that this is a pattern that can hold indefinitely. You join the League of Legends in order to gain protection from Priggs, and to remove yourself from the world that consists only of you and Graves, the hole in your stomach only worsened by every glimpse at the scars that litter his body. The fame is a balm such that you almost forget the past you are running from, and let yourself believe that you could be the hero so many seem to see in you. Eventually, growing stronger over time, Graves follows you, naming the shotgun Destiny with a sharp-toothed grin in your direction that makes your lips twitch into a fair approximation of an answering smile. You fight together, and you die together, and sometimes you even fight against each other. Every time you fall at his hands, it almost feels right, like this is penance.

After the inn, he will thank you for the breakout with a far less verbal affection, and when he moves with you it is hard and rough, or slow and sweet, or both, or neither. You have built this house of cards so finely that for a moment, you trick yourself into believing that it could ever be more than painted cardboard. And the moment a strong wind blows, it so beautifully crashes down, and you, despite yourself, are surprised. The neatest of your cons, it lasts until it doesn’t, because in the end Graves finds the truth despite you. Your failure to eliminate Priggs almost ensures that he resurfaces specifically to ruin you for your double-edged betrayal.

Graves turns Destiny on you with eyes that have turned to stone. Your vest is stained a more violent red as he riddles you with buckshot, but thanks to the nexus you revive, and think that this is what becomes of your eternity, spent at the end of the barrel of a very large gun.

* * *

2 (Jack of Hearts)

Or, let us imagine that you are continue to imagine that you are not heartless, let us presume that like any man, you can feel remorse. Consider, if we will, a different escape.

You sell Graves to Priggs in return for everything you’ve ever wanted, and once again your feelings gnaw at you, drive you to the brink and back again, until at last you’ve found the prison. You practice, this time, less your escapes than your offensives, turn the cardboard deck you carry into a series of lethal weapons, a street magician’s sleight-of-hand serving you as well in combat as it ever did in gambling or cons. You fail, this time, to secure the location of Graves’s cell; when you imagine him in it, your thoughts violently rebel, unable to focus on the theoretical location, seeing only in your mind’s eye the damage you have caused.

When you gate into the prison in this scenario, you don’t know where you’re going. This is not a plan you well thought through; as it is with most of your decisions, this is an affair conducted solely on impulse, and as such you are woefully unprepared. Though you fight like a demon, you are eventually overpowered, shackled, beaten, no match for an overwhelming number of trained professionals when it comes to close combat in closed dimensions.

When they throw you into a cell, they toss you in next to him. You are bleeding, Twisted Fate, from lacerations and bullet wounds, but you are, impossibly, alive. Graves catches you almost as soon as you hit the floor, and despite the years between you, it feels as if it were only yesterday since he last held you like this. There’s a shocked expression in his eyes when he looks at down at you, and in your last moments of consciousness, you wonder if he’s reacting more to your presence, your injuries, or the drastic change of color to your eyes.

“Malcolm,” you manage to greet him, and you bare your blood-stained teeth in a grin before sleep takes you.

The next time you wake, Graves still has you in his grip, though he’s backed himself up against the cold stone wall to support your weight. It strikes you that he had never needed extra leverage to do so before.

“How?” Is the first question he asks you.

“Magic,” is the first answer you give him, smiling cheekily even though the inside of your mouth tastes like death. Your head feels suspiciously like a concussion; you’re just glad that you managed to wake up at all. Graves rolls his eyes from where he’s looking down at you, but lets the point stand. “I was coming to the rescue,” you say by way of further explanation, and he laughs bitterly at that.

“Some rescue,” he scoffs, but he doesn’t let you go, only adding: “what took you?”

To which you can only answer the truth, that it had taken you some time to find him.

You realize that you could leave. Your gate jump is big enough to take you out of the prison, get you to the medical attention that you need. You don’t have your cards anymore, and you still don’t have a plan on how to get out of the prison, even if you did have a way to fight effectively. Gating away now is the smart decision, the right one. But you don’t leave. Your gate is only big enough for one, and you’ve never been the sort of man to back down, even when you know you’re cornered. Even when you know you’re beat.

The next morning Priggs arrives in person with Ionian magic suppressors in order to keep you under lockdown. You’re not afraid, when he moves to put them on. You’ve lived most of your life without magic, losing it again should barely hurt, should just return you to normal (to nothing). Then the green-black marbled stone cuffs close seamlessly around your wrists; the first thing that you notice, is that they are warmer than they should be, for stone. Then your mind whites out from pain, the sudden, horrible loss of senses you had become so accustomed to. Space feels limited again in ways that it hasn’t since you first walked out of Rath’s laboratory; you feel trapped, you feel like clawing at your skin. You aren’t sure if you scream, only that you try very hard not to.

When you can hear again, Priggs is mocking you for your failure, the pathetic endings your of your attempted triple-cross. At length, he enumerates the weak points in your plan, namely the concrete lack thereof. At first, Graves is protective of you, staring at Priggs with the sort of glare that made him infamous at poker tables and used to be able to scare off armed thugs from twenty paces. Then, Priggs reveals the source of your magic.

“The betrayer with a conscience,” he sneers at you, and you can feel the moment that Graves stiffens at your side, his whole body locking up with shock as Priggs gleefully outlines every facet of your betrayal.

When Priggs leaves, Graves beats you to a pulp. Out of what is either sadism, apathy, orders from Priggs, or some mixture of the three, the guards fail to break up the fight and proceed to leave the two of you together. This time, you know for certain that you have a concussion, and maintaining consciousness proves to be a considerable difficulty in between that and the loss of your magic. All you have to look at in the room to distract you is Graves, or the limited dimensions of your new world, and neither is something you really want to think about. You have to dig the bullets out of your wounds yourself, though, and that at least gives you something to do.

You never really get used to living without your magic. Before this you’d made an entire career out of never being trapped and now you are the epitome of stuck; captivity wears horribly on you, and you were never meant for it. Panic is the second of your constant companions for the first week or so. You do learn, eventually, how to keep a handle on this, relearn breathing, relearn focus, but it takes time, it takes effort, and being just not quite alone.

Because even though when you’re given years to wait and there’s not much to do in a prison but talk, Graves refuses to speak with you. To his credit, he only beats on you a few more times; once he breaks your collarbone against the wall the guards separate you, but only long enough for you to heal. Once they’re certain your injuries aren’t going to fester or kill you, they throw you back in with him, and Graves proceeds to ignore you, until one day, what feels like months later, he speaks. Either he’s beginning to pity you, or ignoring you has become monotonous, and beating you repeatedly has lost the appeal of expending his energy on. Considering that sleep is scarce and food is likewise, all thanks to the torture of inches Priggs likes to put the both of you through, you suspect that it’s the latter. You’re not sure, exactly, how long it’s been since you got here. Long enough for your bullet wounds to scar, at least. Long enough to lose track of time. Maybe this is just one more thing to do to pass the time.

“I should kill you,” Graves says at one point, grinding the words out from between gritted teeth. You want to ask him why he hasn’t, but you know this isn’t the moment to press your luck. You hate that they’d taken your hat from you; if you want to watch him, you’re forced to do so from dead on.

The two of you begin to gravitate towards each other again, enforced close contact forcing another sort of close contact, the connection that never fails to die between you doing something to bridge the gap that lies there as well. If Graves forgives you, he never says it out loud; maybe being here in hell with him is enough to hold the ephemeral days as they pass through your hands like so much smoke. Maybe sharing his torment is itself revenge enough.

Freedom comes in the form of a careless guard; two aging conmen are seen as less of a threat by now with several winters gone since your arrival, but the workers here really should know better than to walk so close to the bars where Valoran’s lightest fingers could reach through and snag their keys.

When you break free, Graves uses the same iron pipe that kills two guards to smash the Ionian suppressors off your wrists with a sort of utilitarian malice. Your bones scream from the pain of the impact, but magic floods through your system like the rising of the sun and you smile at it, openly marveling, something hellishly feral waiting in your again changing eyes. Trading in his pipe, Graves gets Destiny from one of the other prisoners, an old gunsmith Priggs kept chained up in his personal lab until your cellmate broke him free. Graves names the gun for you, and uses its smoke grenades to clear a path until he finds shells, while you pilfer a dead guard’s ordinary pack of playing cards. Once you’ve got better weapons in hand, once you’ve got something you can use, something you can focus on, years’ worth of stopped up magic goes howling away from your body. Half the guards that the authorities find later are missing limbs, cut off in cauterized tears too uniform to be anything but supernatural, or else blasted off in rains of blood and metal.

After you leave at least one block smoldering in its own ash, there is no Piltover inn waiting for you. Instead, the first that you do is track down Priggs. The three of you have a score to settle, one that’s been years in the reckoning.

* * *

3 (Tango)

Or, perhaps there is a world where it would be fairer to blame stupidity and a lack of sobriety where one would otherwise malice.

When Priggs walks into the Noxus dive bar about a month after you and Graves ran out with half his account and both of his mistresses, you’re not immediately afraid. There are exits everywhere here, and if he wanted to corner you, he’s picked the wrong place to try and do so. You knew, walking in, that this room has two doors to the street and plenty of windows. If he even tries to catch you, you’re going to be gone before he can so much as blink. You’ve been giving his people the slip for months, and even though you’re already halfway to hammered you know that you could get out if you really needed to.

Priggs sits down next to you, calm as you please, his bodyguards standing at a respectable distance behind him, affording both coverage, and privacy. He orders a two drinks, expensive as shit and enough to pique your interest. Say what you will about the man, but he has a spine, enough balls to come here and face you instead of having his men try and pick you off from the street. Again.

You watch the bartender pour the liquor carefully from the same bottle and within your line of sight, and wait until after Priggs has swallowed before letting the drink past your lips.

“Tired of chasing circles around me?” You drawl with a smile.

“More that I’m tired of wasting my money having you hunted down,” he replies.

“Giving up, then?” A wary hope; while Priggs is rich and money buys competence, he’s crafty, still. You’ve only narrowly escaped a few of the worst of his traps; he’s smarter than he looks, and dirtier, too.

Priggs shakes his head. “More like changing tactics,” he says, and that, that rings with truth.

He holds out a business card. On it is the name Xavier Rath, and the laboratory bearing his name. “I have an acquaintance of mine, he works in magic,” Priggs explains, as if it means nothing to him, “specifically, in trying to give the gift to those who have none.”

You’ve gotten used, in these last few years, to getting what you want. And this, this is something that you want so badly you can taste it. That is exactly why you don’t listen to the voice that tells you to offer this man anything; you want this _too_ much, enough that you can’t let yourself immediately have it.

Poverty clings to your skin in the oddest ways sometimes; why buy food when you can steal, why pay for transportation when a smile in the right direction will do that for you? But you try to shake it off, otherwise; flash clothes, all the money you can spend and all the gold you can waste. Material wealth means nothing to you anymore, Twisted Fate. Your safety has never been about what you carry in your pockets as much as it’s been what you carry in your hands, what you carry in your head. You make your defenses out of movements too fast to track, misdirection, charm, flash, your very wide smiles.

Aregor Priggs on the other hand isn’t the sort of man to be distracted, and he stinks of the sort of mark that’s never been poor. “That power could be yours,” he offers, and only looks at you sideways, sipping his drink like your answer doesn’t even begin to matter.

“What do you say?” He wheedles, plying you with more drinks, fanning out unintelligible diagrams that detail arcane symbols that you vaguely recognize.

The offer is undeniably tempting. But having lived well with it all your life, you’ve always been able to recognize greed in others. Priggs wants something from you, that much is clear. He very, very much wants you to take this deal, and even drunk you think you understand why.

“This is going to kill me, isn’t it?” You ask him, pieces clicking slowly into place.

Priggs shrugs, and smiles with far too many teeth shown to be an expression of any genuine emotion. “Almost certainly. The fatality rate is exceedingly high so far; hence why I myself am bowing out. But you’ll do it anyway; word on the street is you’d want something like this far too much.” And while that last part isn’t true, exactly, he has you pegged rightly enough.

“Why give this to me?”

“Because,” he answers, “it’s like you said; it’s very likely this will kill you. I’m someone who’d appreciate the irony in that, giving you what just enough rope to watch you hang yourself with it. Besides,” Priggs adds, “if I hadn’t found you here, I would have offered it to that partner of yours; it would have been interesting, to watch the two of you tear each other apart over this opportunity.”

Despite yourself, and maybe this is the rum speaking, you laugh at that notion.

“Graves?” You start, and finish your glass. “Graves would never go for something like this fool-headed; he’s too busy holing up in his hotel room, cleaning his guns.”

Drunk as you are, you are not quick enough to catch the way that Priggs’s toothed smile goes sharper at your words. You miss, too, the way that one of the waitresses slips away, darting out into the streets to pass your words along. You’re bound for Zaun that evening, and don’t bother to check in with Graves, trusting that he’ll be able to find you if he needs you.

And he does, of course, but that’s years down the line, long after you’d stopped wondering where, exactly, Graves had gone.

* * *

4 (Musketeer)

Maybe it’s neither stupidity nor malice; maybe you’re smarter than you look, Twisted Fate. Maybe there’s something more to you than just being quick, being technically clever. Maybe you were given just the right kind of good opportunity; maybe you even made good with it.

It starts with a whisper. Just the hint of a sign that something is moving in the back alleys of Zaun (and something is always moving in the back alleys of Zaun) and that this time, what’s moving is grand. You think, at first, that it’s some sort of shipment coming in. A captured prisoner, maybe, or else some sort of magical material coming up from the digs in Shurima. But whatever it is, it concerns magic, something powerful, and raw, and apparently, too dangerous to touch; the first leads you track down vanish into the ether. Every Zaunite contact you track down clams up tighter than a welded hazard crate, and a few of them go so far as out of the city-state entirely in order to avoid you. This does absolutely nothing to deter you, and if anything, only serves to intrigue you more.

When you find the lead you’re looking for, it’s quite literally underground. Rath Laboratories, hosted in an oxymoronically clean section of Zaun’s sewers, where the truly mad do the best of their work. What intrigues you more is its aboveground facilities; Rath Laboratories is both well funded and surprisingly legitimate for Zaun science. Even its test subjects are of high quality, looking healthy and strong when they walk in in a way that only high class soldiers and the rich do. Working your way inside proves difficult, to say the least. In fact, it proves to be almost completely impossible, but you are nothing if not persistent.

You find the beginnings of your own entrance in the form of a very drunk scientist. Of course, he is not so drunk when you find him. The drunkenness happens only once you have charmed him after you into a bar. In exchange for a small handful of gold the bartender gives you good rum, which you give to the scientist along with a wide smile that is itself empty promise of something more. In turn, the scientist gives you everything.

Rath Laboratories, run by a man of the same name, is investigating the nature of magic. Specifically, if it can be transferred, if it can be created. The answer to these questions, the scientist assures you through the haze of the drinks you keep handing him, is indubitably yes. But, he continues with an air of intense can the _potential_ for magic be made a reality? Can the inborn potential be given to those who have none?

“And can it?” You push him suddenly, an old frenzy making itself known once again. Hope, you’ve found, is a dangerous thing, tasting very much like the start of a heist.

“Well that’s,” the scientist slurs, staring at the hand of yours that has found itself fisted in his shirt as if it were a foreign object and not a limb, “that’s what we’re trying to figure out, right?”

You do not drop the scientist. But it’s a close thing.

After that, your work begins in earnest. Namely, you think about what it would take to invest Graves. Because you’re going to get him involved, it’s not even a question. The thing about having a partner is that you check each other’s work; you know that if you can’t make this plan worthwhile, Graves will never agree. So you do your homework, your legwork.

Counting on your new friend, you obtain two lists, one of clients and one of creditors, looking for those on Rath’s rolodex with blackmail potential. Accordingly, anyone affiliated with the Noxus army is immediately right out. So are a dozen targets with few enough weak spots to be pressed on, as are the other customers whose power lies only in their wealth; Graves has always had a fondness for money, but enormous piles of cash won’t be enough to get him in on what you’re planning.

Because what you’re planning could very easily kill or ruin you both; but you’ve always wanted to try a triple cross.

Eventually you narrow the list of potential targets down to three names, and this is what you bring to Graves. A hextech pioneer with scrupulous morals and a poorly guarded warehouse full of experimental technology, an emerging engineer invested in biomechanics, and a rich industrialist with a taste in young women and corporate espionage.

“Aregor Priggs!” Graves interrupts you. “Heard that name before; a gunsmith went missing a few years back, used to work on the arms market. He made the best weapons anyone had seen in years, but they were way too big to see real fighting, not like war,” Graves’s continues, his hands moving unconsciously as if to grip one of his guns. “Then he disappears after refusing a few too many customers, and all of a sudden small customs start coming out of Priggs’s laboratories, looking way too much like someone else’s work to be anything new.”

“Think you could find him?” You ask, and Graves takes a minute to think about it.

Trust doesn’t come easy in this line of work, and you know that better than anyone, Twisted Fate. You make your living on the manipulation of that particular commodity, you know the worth of trust, what it can be used to buy what it can be sold for. You are, like the best of thieves, first and foremost a counterfeiter of this peculiar currency.

So when Graves says _yes_ , like he’s sucking on a lemon, like he knows that you’re going to make him regret this later, well.

“We’re going to get ourselves killed,” is the next thing he says, and he’s probably not wrong.

But everything proceeds suspiciously well; the scam on Priggs goes off without a hitch. The two of you head for the Demacian coastline with two of his mistresses and a sizeable amount of his money. You and Graves give the industrialist a runaround for months just because you can, just to get him mad, to get him angry, knowing that nobody thinks straight, thinks strategically when they’re nothing but rage. By the time he finally closes in on you, Priggs is almost spitting mad, or he would be if he were the sort of man that allowed himself to spit.

“I’ve got a deal for you,” he says in the nicest casino you haven’t been banned from. In his hands he’s got a business card with Rath’s name on it, and no mention of the experiments’ failure rates.

“Name your price,” you tell him, and the rush of knowing that you’re halfway there is getting drunk on the best whiskey there is.

You give him a place, and a time, and that night you and Graves paint the town black and red, spending the last of Priggs’s money. That night isn’t a goodbye, it’s not, it’s a precaution. There is a perfectly good chance that one or both of you are going to die in this venture what with Graves going to prison and you into an experimental program that’s killed a sizeable number of its volunteers. You’re not saying goodbye, but if this is going to be the last then you’re damn well going to make it worth remembering later.

In the morning, you are gone. By that night, Graves is too.

You take Priggs’s business card to Rath’s laboratories. You walk up to the front door as calm as you please, and the only weapon you’ve got on you is a knife in your boot, a staple from too many close escapes. The inside of the labs are bright and sterile, and the staff very intelligent seeming, all white coats and polished chrome, the light glinting off their glasses. You aren’t lulled by it; this is Zaun, after all. All the brightness indicates here is funding. There is, you remind yourself when you are led to the clean quarters you will be staying in, a portion of this place that lives in the sewers with the rest of Zaun’s real advances.

The tests get more and more arcane in inches, an otherworld of magic and science blending in ways that most people would probably consider unholy were they to actually see it preformed. The strangeness starts easily enough, limping clients in the workout center they send you to for athletic testing, a few faces that you fail to notice more than twice in the halls, looking somehow sallow and _wrong_ around the edges. Then there is the screaming, and the machine that some of the Noxus clients whisper about; someone tries to leave in the middle of the night, but you don’t hear about it until later, until a body is discovered in the sewers in such a state as to be suspicious even for Zaun, mutilated as if destroyed by force from the inside out.

Eventually, it is your turn. The success rate, at present, is still zero. But Rath and his staff have high hopes, yes, and they never say exactly, that the machine has killed everyone else who’s set foot in it so far. Not that you mind, really. You’d like there to be better odds, but you’re more than willing to put up with a few titanic risks in order to get what you want.

You are strapped in, and poked with something that makes your veins burn, makes you go blind in a haze of oscillating colors as it rewires your nervous system. Then the machine turns on, and you are electric; your eyes hurt like they’re going to fall out but then you can see again, and you are still strapped down and there, there, you know, you can sense it in the room and in your fingertips and the back of your tongue—

“Success! Now, dissection,” Rath crows, and you realize that you are still strapped down.

When you break out of Rath’s laboratories, you’re shivering with the feel of it, magic live and almost uncontrollable where it runs like a river of lightning under your skin. You kill more people than you can keep track of; colored light escapes from your fingers and some of it only makes you stronger. People scream, and rail, and when the guards at last try to close in on your untrained power, you find yourself wishing to be anywhere but here—

And you’re standing on a moonlit beach somewhere in Demacia, waiting for Graves to break out and find you.

When you walk into his head a year later, he’s got a gun bigger than his torso, and underneath all his new lines and scars, he’s smiling.

* * *

5 (High Noon)

Or, maybe, because there has to be at least one world where it didn’t go wrong, one world where it didn’t even go right— what about this?

There never was much honor among thieves, and you know that better than most, Twisted Fate, but there are some things even you won’t abide.

Priggs offers you everything you’ve ever wanted on a silver platter, and all he wants in return is the only person who’s ever known you that still thinks of you in the context of trust. Priggs talks about his fortune, and revenge, and all you can think about is the way that Graves had moved the money so carefully, the way he had laughed in the sun after a night of scamming Demacian tourists out of most of if not all of their cash. He’d been happy, you’d both been happy, drunk on the heady success of a well-executed con, a week with two beautiful women and a mountain of cash to spend, followed by a beach vacation, full of water and sand and the unimportant plans for your future.

Priggs looks at you and holds out a hand expectantly, and you realize that you’d rather give him your left arm.

“No,” you drawl slowly, scanning the room for potential exits from beneath your hat and finding none, a man posted at every entrance, “no, I don’t think I’ll be taking your, ah, _generous_ offer.”

Priggs goes scarlet and motions for his bodyguards but you are moving already, prepared to make a grand exit since they have all the doorways covered. You crash through a window and into the street, brushing the glass off your vest as you bolt your way towards the nearest bar, making plans as you go to beat the heat.

When you find Graves, he’s in the middle of a six-man poker hustle, but when he sees your face, something in it makes him stand, makes him reach for his gun, makes him leave with you without protesting, or collecting his earnings.

“The hell did you do?” Is the first thing he asks you, followed by the more pertinent question of: “who the hell did you piss off?”

“No one important,” you lie through your teeth, all the while your self-interest screaming at you to have left such an opportunity behind.

“So we’ve got the devil on our tail, then,” Graves retorts dryly, matching pace with you as you run through the streets of Zaun, ducking into alleys, dodging into doorways. All you have to do is make it out and you’ll be free, you’ll stay free, at the cost of everything you ever wanted.

The price gnaws inside you like starvation used to; you are about seven steps from going back, but you try not to call your own bluffs, try to stick with your bets once you’ve called them. You’ve never shied from blood before, even if you never reveled in it the way Graves sometimes did, but you’re not willing to pay blood for money for magic, at least, not your own. But you are filled with indecision anyway; this may not have been one of your best ideas. Everything about the situation feels horribly wrong, except for that he follows you, except for that when you asked him to, he ran.

“When have I ever steered you wrong before?” You ask Graves breezily, and he glares at you, a number of bad heists springing to mind for the both of you: Piltover Customs, a Noxus biological weapons cache, the first time you tried to raid the Demacian royal treasury; there’s a reason why he’s responsible for the details of your plans, now.

Accordingly, Graves bites back: “constantly,” but he follows you anyway. “Always trouble,” he mutters in your direction, and you find it in yourself to grin at that, because somehow running for your life doesn’t feel half so bad if he’s going to needle you about it the whole way across the border.

Escape has always been your forte, Twisted Fate, so you make the plan this time, and you’re determined not to let it be a bad one. You’ll get used, the both of you, to being always on the run, but it’s not so bad, it’s not so different. You’d always spent your lives travelling together, ghosting from city state to city state in an effort to stay ahead of the law. The only difference now is that you’ve got another long arm on your heels, another hound baying for your blood.

On your way to the Freljord, Graves grumbles and complains incessantly about the cold until you ditch your trail southwards, headed directly to the Shurima deserts, towards the Barrier. It’s not hard to talk him into it; there’s talk of relics in the sands, and power, and riches.

“And magic, too, I bet,” he says knowingly, side-eyeing you as you charm your way onto a caravan going south.

“I wouldn’t rightly know,” you drawl, and Graves laughs at you, deep and sharp and just once, shaking his head like he can’t believe you, like he wouldn’t have this any other way.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Section headings are all coming from TF's skins, because he actually has enough to support that. There will in fact be a sixth part to this; it's not done yet, so that'll be chapter two.
> 
> Trying to use as much canon as I can get my hands on, unfortunately, League lore seems to be sparse as hell now that they've discontinued the main plot, as it were, and begun reforming backgrounds left and right. Not to say that I disapprove of the lore changes, but I do bemoan the lack of semi-regular injections of story. Which obviously means that I should start writing my own? What am I doing, someone stop me, this game has eaten my damn life.
> 
> Graves’s background says he got the gun from the contact of a fellow prisoner sometime after they busted out, but that makes no sense when some of his release material talks about smoke grenades, and then there’s the Prisonbreak Graves skin, so. If you spot any other canonical errors not immediately handwaved by this being a series of AUs, tell me about it and I'll make the faux pas go away.


	2. Paid In Full

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is what Twisted Fate has left you, Malcolm Graves; an ungraceful descent into old age, a chest full of regrets, and a shotgun nearly half your size, more as like a cannon than an actual firearm.

\+ 1 (Underworld)

When you wake up, the morning after Fate leaves, it’s because someone’s thrown something through your window. It turns out to be a canister filled with sleeping gas that fills the room while you’re still trying to react, trying to grab the pistol you sleep with only to find that it’s not under the pillow where you left it. You go down in a shower of broken glass and the morning sun as seen through a thousand shattered points of light, and all you can do, as you crash against the side of the bed you’d only barely made it out of, is try and figure out where the hell your gun had gone.

You’ve been to prison before, but this is terrible. Prison, at least, prison outside of Noxus, doesn’t usually entail regular and brutal torture of the mental and physical varieties. There’s almost no food, almost no sleep. You live in a well of silence, and it’s not the damp that gets you, the closed in dimensions of a world without the sun. There’s been worse, in your life, and pain isn’t exactly new. You’re used to it, you can take a lot of things, can hold up under a significant amount of stress, even though waterboarding isn’t exactly like getting shot, though it _is_ almost exactly like drowning.

The worst, really, is Priggs. The way he talks to you. He keeps you chained, right there in a cell next to one of his laboratories, next to an old gunsmith that he forces to make weapons on pain of having his precious fingers broken. You don’t care, not really, what happens to the smith, he’s not your conrern, and there’s nothing you’d be able to do for each other until you find some way to escape, because that’s going to happen, you’re going to escape, at least if Fate doesn’t come and find you, first. But Priggs, Priggs looks at you like he hasn’t already won, somedays,

What makes you boil, what kills the thing inside of you that wasn’t entirely cynical—

“What the hell are you holding out for?” Priggs seethes, and watches as one of his guards drives a burning poker into the skin of your arm. The part of you that can still think under the pain and the smell of burning meat knows that he’s really asking why you’re not broken, why you don’t wake up every morning like the world ended, why you haven’t given up, haven’t begged him—

“Go to hell,” you choke out, then go back screaming when the brand presses back in.

“No one is coming for you!” He shouts, and you almost smile, because who’s the desperate one now, you want to know, who’s winning now—

“How do you think I knew where to find you?” He asks you in a hiss when his guards throw you back into your cell some indeterminable time later. “He left you for dead! Who the hell do you think took your gun?”

You spend the rest of the night screaming, and it’s not in pain. Because it makes sense, too much sense, that he would do this to you, much as you don’t want to believe. You’d gone down into the darkness with the sound of his voice trailing you, the way he used to say your name, and it hurts in a way that nothing else here has, to know that the night before they came for you, Fate fucked you so hard that you didn’t even realize you were being screwed.

When you’re awake, later, starved out and hurting and this close to dead, you can barely speak and yet, you have a plan, in two simple parts: escape, and revenge.

“How’d you like to blow this place sky high someday?” You ask the gunsmith when you finally get something of your voice back.

The smile he gives you in return is just as feral as you are. “Give me time,” he says, “to make something special for the party.”

You smile back; you always were happier with a plan. If Priggs notices, that you are surer after that night, that you are colder because you have something to hold on to, bitter and awful as it is, he doesn’t notice, or doesn’t care. He should have, though, because later, years later, he is dead and you are free.

Priggs should have known better than to keep you both where he could see you; that necessitated, in a way, that the two of you be able to see each other. Having chained you, Priggs seemed to have convinced himself that at some point you had been broken, and in doing so he had come to believe that you both were harmless, domesticated. This belief, this oversight, was his downfall. Even beaten and bound, you always were what you were.

Priggs, like you, should have known not to trust a con.

The gunsmith goes to work for Noxus after the escape, but lets you keep your prize under the condition that you use her to kill Priggs. You do so gladly, and after that you know that she’s still meant for at least one other. She is enormous, and because of her size she’d be useless in any hands but yours, where she doesn’t fit, not at all, but she belongs. You name her Destiny, after an old friend.

But you were cold about this, you were clear. You knew what you had to do; it was going to be simple enough. Find Fate, shoot him. If you could, you would ruin him in reputation so that he is infamous or better, forgotten after death. Have it out with. Leave the place that you find him with his blood staining the leather of your boots.

Then Fate strolls into your judgment and your hell-forged rationality falls away in a cascade of splintered fire. Having your mind pried open is excruciating, not out of any sort of physical or mental pain, but out of the knowledge of who, exactly, had been looking.

You wonder, viciously, if he liked what he saw, those last glimpses of hell. If he was at all afraid once he understood just how little you have left to lose.

This is what you have learned from Twisted Fate in the years that you have known him; that escape, like freedom, is a mindset. That confidence is most of mundane magic. And that when you die, you look just the same as any other man. The League’s replays show your body cooling time after time, face down on the hard-packed dirt or the courtyard stone. You bleed just the same. Even the magic that brings you back can’t render you any more than a man; but you don't need to be a monster to ruin Twisted Fate. All you need to be is a good shot.

It’s a good thing you've always preferred a moving target.

You always were more careful than Fate was; it doesn’t surprise you that he doesn’t hide, though it galls you all the same. The fact remains that you were the one out of the two of you that cared about the money; you were the only one it meant something to. Fate was always in it for something more intangible. Concepts and ideas like safety and freedom, as if money couldn't buy them.

You’d thought, towards the end, that you’d understood Twisted Fate and his strange way of weighing things. When you got sold up the river, when you’d learned that he'd been the one to do it, there’d been this awful moment where at first, you didn’t believe. Because hope held out; back then, you would have bust his skinny ass out of prison. Hell, you’d done it before. You always went back for each other. There was a warped sort of honor among the right kind of thieves, the very best who lived and sided by the men at their backs.

And then you realized, that one screaming night in the prison, with a dawning horror like lead rounds settling in your gut, that Fate’s priorities would have always encompassed this. It wasn’t necessarily that blood meant nothing to men who had none, rather the opposite. He knew, exactly, if not down to the coin, the cost of the thing he was buying.

You are awake at night sometimes, thinking about what you would have done, if put in his place. If a lifetime's worth of money would have tempted you to throw him to the dogs. You'd do it now for nothing, you’d pay to see it done, even, and that clouds every thought you've ever had. But though the question remains of your battered integrity, there’s nothing left for you to lose, and you’ve had years and years in relative silence to plan.

The Institute of War isn’t what you’d thought it’d be, though. The summoners offered you everything and instead gave you nothing. At least not anything you wanted, not really, just new clothes and shelter, a place that you could sleep, having nowhere else to go. There is no glory here, no victory, no defeat. Just an endless procession of identical battlefields and disappearing corpses, a foreign presence sitting in your head telling you what to shoot and where to run, like you’d never blasted your way through a bad situation before.

Fighting with Twisted Fate never stops feeling right, and you hate yourself for that. No matter which side of the battle you’re on, whether you’re diving to save each other or to see each other bleed, you feel like it’s always the same; you’re running to him and he’s just running away. At night you think of prison, and try not to think of him; your dreams are filled with his laughter all the same, how he had always weighed more than he should have in your arms when he could practically dance through a fight the way he did. In the mornings, you wake up tired, exhausted from rage and the barest efforts at keeping it alive.

You spend your afternoons, when you have them free, trying to get as far as you can get from the Institute’s grounds while still travelling on foot. You were never that interested in nature or her beauty, but there’s something that can be said for the views presented when the sun sets over the woods and plains that surround the Institute of War. Walking here, you feel clear, or better, empty, like the weight of your regrets isn’t going to strangle you. In a few minutes you’ll walk back, but there— the faint sounds of the high grasses moving in a pattern that has nothing to do with the wind.

You turn around, and find solid blue eyes staring at you from the shadow beneath a hat, the colors new but the expression familiar; Twisted Fate with something to say, biding his time to say it. You wish you didn’t know that smile.

You’ve been here for a year now, and seen your once-partner only on the battlefield, or out of the corner of your eye, as if he knows that you’ll only tolerate his presence when you’re fighting for the same team, friendly fire magically prohibited. So to have Fate come walking up to you in the early stages of the evening that could still be generously designated as broad daylight, well. To put it another way: Fate walks up to you like it doesn’t bother him that from the minute you can see him, you’re pointing a gun directly at his chest. What you really want to know, though, is how the hell he found you, why he would approach you so as to put the sinking sun directly in his unnatural eyes.

You were never a coward, Malcolm Graves, but there’s something about this situation that unsettles you.

“Malcolm,” he drawls, and there it is, waiting for you, that flicker of hate you’ve become so accustomed to nurturing.

You lift Destiny from your side in a motion that is fluid with practice, directing her barrel towards Fate’s torso, two hands braced to keep her steady. You realize that you don’t really have anything to say. The two of you had aired your contempt for him a year ago; he knows that you hate him. He knows (he has to know) that’s it’s always been about more than that.

“Like you would do it,” Fate sneers, “not when something’s really on the line, not when it counts.”

You click the safety off Destiny. “Think I couldn’t kill a man?” You growl, and he doesn’t so much as move a muscle. Behind you, the sun inches further and further towards the horizon, turning the grasses gold in autumn wind.

“I _know_ you wouldn’t kill _me_ ,” he corrects you, and you can’t tell if he’s not lying.

Years of closeness had made you masters in each other. You knew every one of Fate’s tells, what few he had. You learned to read the liquid slide of his expressions, the way that he could freeze like ice to lock them in place, how he could go from sharp to smooth without so much as blinking, and all this despite that you were never the one who lived by reading others like so much written word. With his new eyes, with the way they slide so easy through the primary colors and a green almost like they used to be, you’ve slowly lost your ability to understand. Doubt has crippled your capacity to parse him; Fate is, these days, a language you no longer speak, something you used to know and still grasp at the edges of. He’s always spoken in code, one that you can’t decipher anymore. Since prison, you’ve been trying to figure out if you ever did.

You used to imagine what you looked like to him under the weight of that kind of knowledge; you know, now, that he looked at you and saw a sucker.

“Shoot me,” he dares you, and this is what you realize about Twisted Fate: he isn’t afraid. Not of you, Malcolm Graves. Not of you.

You fire once and your whole body jumps with the recoil of the gun. When the smoke clears, Twisted Fate is lying on the ground next to the charred remains of what used to be his left arm, the left side of his torso ripped open, the bones of his shattered ribcage white, and wetly gleaming. Soaking the dirt is an expanding pool of the blood that remained the same rust-iron red despite magic, turning the golden grasses brown as his life pours out from your hands and into the earth.

It takes a moment, for the reality to sink in, for you to realize what’s been done. To realize that this far from the Fields of Justice, Fate isn’t just going to get up again. Out here, bleeding to death on the ground won’t lead to his resurrection at the nexus; he’d followed you here on purpose, you realize. He’d come here knowing he could die.

Watching him die at your hands, blood sinking into the dirt, there is a sick, half-thinking part of you that wants to know just how much of this he had planned.

Well, you’ll never ask your questions if he’s dead, and there, there you go— when you scoop him up, he stills weighs more than he should for being such a skinny bastard. The balance of him is off, though, with an arm missing. You try not to think about it; you think instead about the way that he’s always looked so good in red, but on his already dark clothes his blood is just water, tacky and familiar and smelling heavily of iron under all the gunpowder and ash. You’d like to say that this isn’t familiar, but you’ve killed each other too many times for that now, and you’d saved him from tight spots more than once, though never a scrape this bad, never _missing an arm and some of ribs—_  you shake your head. Destiny settled beneath him, you start to run, not caring that every jarring step you take must be agony for him.

“Why?” He manages to ask you when you lift him, wheezing the air out through what through his singular lung in order to make a sound that vaguely resembles the word you can only assume he has spoken. You are startled that he can make noise at all, and the part of you that used to care wants to yell at him for wasting his breath when he’s going to need it to live, but you are starting to grow so sick of lies, and of lying to yourself.

“I don’t know,” you answer him, and you realize that this is the truth.

When you run, you do so knowing that you’re not as fast as Fate is; you never have been. In pursuits you’d made up for that with sheer hard-headed doggedness, but this isn’t a chase, it’s a sprint, a race against time and one you know that you’re losing. He still fits in your arms like he was never meant to be there for long.

In true form, Fate’s gone by the end of the night. The League has good medicine, the best in the world, but Fate was long dead by the time you got him to their doors. Your shot had only narrowly missed his heart, and it still punched a fist-sized hole through one of his lungs, not to mention the almost complete destruction of one of his limbs and several of his ribs. The summoners (or at least the ones that don’t look at you like a murderer) tell you clinically that there’s no way he would have survived, even if you’d shot him in the middle of their hospital. There is the implicit condemnation from some of the more unscrupulous summoners that you were an idiot for coming back and instead of dumping his body and going as far underground as you could get. But to tell the truth, the idea hadn’t even occurred to you. You hadn’t though this far ahead; there was never an ‘after,’ for all that you used to be the one most concerned with the practicalities of your plans.

Running with him through that endless field of grass, you’d felt the moment Fate stopped breathing, but his blood had still been warm where it was soaking into your clothes. People are nasty, when they die; there’s the blood, certainly, but shit too, the body losing control of itself as whatever drives it vacates the corpse. Fate just died like he lived, recklessly, and you think that you may be mourning the lack of theatrics about it, to know that he, like you, dies the same as any other man. The rest of you just can’t believe that he’s actually dead, that he stayed dead.

There’s always been a part of you that’s been prone to irrational hope in Twisted Fate. You spent a lifetime in hell waiting for him to come back to you, and only gave up when it became impossible to ignore the evidence. So it only makes sense that you can’t shake the feeling now that death is too much of a paltry thing to stop him. And maybe you were right not to even try; it turns out death is a surprisingly impermanent affliction here at the Institute of War; not only is there the nexuses’ power, but connections too to darker magic that’s seen champions revived before they so much as entered the main hall’s glittering doors.

“Do what you have to,” you tell the summoners when they bring in the Sentinel’s Sorrow, the Chronokeeper and the Gravdigger, ask you for Fate’s postmortem consent. He’s had you listed in his forms as next of kin since you arrived at the Institute; that, moreso than his death is what makes the illness sink in, what makes you the most physically sick.

“This is going to cost him,” Zilean warns you, your head still reeling, “and it may not work. The powers he’ll be selling to always come to collect.”

You laugh, hollowly. “He never cared about methods before, and never met a loan shark he couldn’t shake. He’s always been that way, especially about power, about magic—” you shake your head. “Do what you have to,” you say again. “When he’s back, he won’t curse you for it.”

Very slowly, Zilean nods, and then the party of dark things and blood magicians have left the room. The doors shut, and you see first light, slipping from beneath the doors in little fluid tangles that give way to chanting, that give way to unearthly screams. If you hadn’t spent so much time fighting (and fighting alongside) things like Nocturne, like Thresh, you’d be spending the next several nights awake. Not that you were planning to sleep, really.

You sit alone, and none of the personnel who file past in these late hours bother to tell you to leave, or to eat, or even try and take care of the physical needs you’d made yourself so good at ignoring when you were in prison. You’re almost certainly going to face serious repercussions for this, and you’re obviously too ruined to run. The summoners have more important, dire work than your sorry state to attend to beyond the confines of those doors and in other foreign, magic places, and so you are allowed to pace the floors outside the Institute’s medical wing, passing the time like you used to in the prison when you had the energy to stand, wondering that it’s not so different, pacing here and pacing there for a man that never should’ve trusted in the first place.

With the moon spilling in through the hall’s tall windows, the night goes as it pleases. In the back of your head you are replaying a series of moments like the hours that you lived them in; getting caught inside Piltover Customs, the way Fate had hauled your ass out of there after one of the guard turrets had riddled you with crystal bullets; the way he flinched that time you had to shoot him down from the hangman’s noose in Bilgewater; what it felt like to have him in your head, all the horrible, snarling fury of it, to know that he could see what you’d been through and still smile in a way that suggested a laugh; watching him die, over and over again, at yours hands and not, the way it never felt right; robbing Zaun’s three biggest casinos in one night and laughing about it later; hustling tourists on a beach in Demacia; watching him come to your rescue before magic and after but never when it counted. This is what plagues you, Malcolm Graves, when you are alone with the things that the two of you have done, and mostly to each other.

Your feet having grown tired of trying to wear holes in the stone floor, you back yourself against a wall, realizing that Destiny is becoming much too heavy for your aging hands. You wonder, idly, when it was they started shaking. Pressed up against the firmament behind you, you slide down the cool brick of the wall, and sit heavily upon the floor, putting Destiny beside you.

This is how the sun finds you, hours later, slipping in through the windows. It is, too, how one of the summoner necromancers finds you. She is covered in soot, and the faint smell of fresh, wet earth; you realize that she smells like a grave, and you try not to laugh, knowing that the sound would be far beyond the mere hysterical. But you can’t say anything to her, you find. Her face says she’s got news, and you’re not exactly sure which version you want to hear, anymore.

“He’s asking for you,” is what she tells you instead of offering you a greeting, or a hand off the ground, obviously unhappy with this latest turn of events. “You’ll have to leave _that_ at the door,” she adds, pointing at your hands with her chin, her expression clearly denoting a sniffing distaste. Wordlessly, you give her Destiny, and it feels strange, not to be lighter without that gun in your hands.

“You _might_ get this back later, _if_ you score well on your Tribunal review. Don’t go anywhere, after this,” the summoner warns, in a tone that implies the Institute’s displeasure at the prospect of having to someday go out and find you.

You’re not sure, really, where it is she thinks that you’d go. You’d always thought that the summoning magic could keep you chained here, if they so wished it. Then again, it’s not like you don’t know full well how to disappear. But you cannot think about this long, for you are through the door, and the summoner is gone, most likely to sleep, or wash the blood off her hands. You realize that your own are still caked with it; there, pooled under your fingernails in brown-orange swaths, painted over your leathered skin all the way up to where your shirt bares to your wrists. You can feel it under the sleeves of your clothes, and know from experience that you’ll be cleaning matted blood out of the hairs there later, when you can finally allow yourself to bathe and rest.

The room is full of beds, long and identical, white sheets and metal frames standing in pristine rows beneath the windows, a military hospital for a war that will never be fought, blanketed by the rising sun. Fate sits in one of beds looking almost like he belongs there, tall and lanky, eyes closed, and much too still. Underneath the pale smock they’ve thrown him into, his dark skin is sallow from blood loss. He’s propped up against the pillows, but his hat is sitting at his feet where you doubt he’d be able to reach it, covered in blood and as worn out as he looks. For a moment, you are blinded by sense memories of the few times you’d been able to catch him like this, the bad mornings after plans gone wrong when you both needed to touch each other to be sure. The lines of his body are familiar, and you could almost believe that this is a moment from years ago, that if you reach out and touch him, he’ll still be real.

Then Fate opens his eyes at the sound of your feet moving too heavily along the floor, and the illusion is shattered. He looks at you with unreadable, unnaturally red eyes, and as he turns his whole body to face you, you notice the claw-fingered limb that now sits in place of what used to be his left arm. The blue-green phantom limb shines wetly in the early light, and the curve of his body and the smock he’s got on makes it impossible to see how far up the texture goes, but considering how much damage had been done to him, you have to imagine that it must cover most of that side of his chest. Even disregarding the talons, the fingers on it are too long, the angles incorrect, as if the bones that may or may not be inside it were only approximations of the human form. It’s ugly, and wrong, and you can’t stop staring.

“Kind of useless right now,” Fate says when he catches you at it. “Won’t move the way I want it, damn thing’s dead weight right now.”

Slowly, you move towards him, and let yourself fall with painstaking movements into the chair someone had placed at his bedside. Folding down, you can feel the joints inside you shuddering at the simple motions, the dried blood that sticks to your clothes making them crinkle unpleasantly. All you’ve got in your head right now are memories and questions you’ve made a habit out of assuredly not thinking about, and you’re lacking any and all of the energy it would take you to sort them through.

Fate, for his part, has never abided silences, and is more than content to keep talking to fill it when you can’t. But he doesn’t look straight at you, not that he ever did.

“Makes sense I can’t use it right,” he starts, frowning at his new arm, “it really is dead weight— feels like it’s got a mind of its own sometimes,” he grimaces. “Like it’s not even mine.”

“Like you ever had a problem taking what’s not yours,” you snort, despite yourself. Fate twitches, when the words hit him, but he doesn’t answer to that, and you can’t tell, really, if that was a finch. “You’ll relearn it,” you tell him tiredly, and feel your age in every inch of your skin.

Fate keeps staring at his new arm, and doesn’t look at you. “I’m going to need to relearn a lot of things,” he amends, and you recognize the way his human fingers are almost trembling, you both know it used to be one of his tells.

“How much of this did you plan?” You want to know. The words sound like they leave you from a tunnel of broken glass. Considering how dry your throat feels, they may well have done; you’d run until you couldn’t, you haven’t had anything to drink in hours, you haven’t really spoken—

Fate gives you a wry grimace. “Wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” he says, “but the answer is ‘not much.’ I’m tired of this, Malcolm,” he admits, but you can’t tell, still, if it’s really an admission or if it’s not just the latest in a list of finely-crafted lies, too much about him different now, and too much the same for you to make any sort of judgment.

You’re not sure what to say to him. You’re not sure of anything. Only thing you are even _remotely_ certain of is that it feels like someone’s gone after your insides with a rusted spoon, and yet Fate’s the one that’s actually got a hole in him. He’s been probably playing you like a game from beginning to end, and you feel used and awful, and too tired to care.

“We even?” He asks you, but he does it sideways, out of the corner of his eye like he’s still got that damn hat to try and hide under. Instead, he just looks like a fool. The nonchalance, so obviously forced, is what gives him away.

You punch him in the throat. Immediately you find yourself magically restrained; the summoners outside must have still been monitoring his condition. They burst through the door, shattering the illusion of privacy to pin your arms in what appear to be shackles made of light. You listen to Fate wheeze on the bed in front of you, his working hand scrabbling at his neck, his clawed arm flopping uselessly on the sheets.

“Now we are,” you tell him as you let the summoners drag you away, and when he looks at you, his eyes are solid green; you don’t know, exactly, what that means.

The summoners have you halfway out the door when Fate throws out his still-working arm in a haphazard gesture.

“Don’t,” he chokes out; they look at him like he’s got two heads, and you do, too. “I don’t— just, leave him,” he manages.

Reluctantly, the summoners do. You are deposited back in your chair. The inside of your head is nothing so much as a wash of white noise, and you’re almost glad you can’t find the energy in yourself to think.

The sun continues rising but the quality of light does not much change. Your hands are still bloody and still shaking; dully, you realize that it is most likely fatigue, that you need to bathe, to sleep. When was the last time you ate? Yesterday morning, you think, but you aren’t sure. You realize that you’d left Destiny with the summoner in the hall; you never leave her places, not even when you’re dead, they took her from you, why did you let them take her from you—

Very slowly, you close your dirty hands into fists, and let the dawn move slowly through the room’s enormous windowpanes, painting the recovery room in dull blues and oranges. Not yet morning yellow or high noon’s blue, the shadows of the clouds upon the floor are red, but not bloodstained. You’ve never cared to watch the sunrise. It remains as you’d always thought it to be; utterly tiring, and a waste of your time, but it warms your shock-cold skin, which might be worth something.

If you had the energy, you’d leave, but your body is telling you you’re going to die soon; either that, or pass out from sheer exhaustion of the body, mind and spirit. You try to stand anyway, and your knees scream at you, you’re not young anymore, you back aches and you’re only going to end up in this infirmary yourself but damn if you weren’t otherwise going to be trapped here—

“Hey,” Twisted Fate says, and your head snaps up so fast you’d swear you got whiplash, your body crashing back down into the chair.

“What?” You snap, all bite, all emotions you could never help showing around him; this is what he does to you, when you’ve been so terribly flayed. You feel like an open wound, and you’re not even the one that got shot.

“Want to play a game of cards?” Fate asks, and you laugh, the sound strangled in your throat. “No sleeves to keep things up,” he adds, and you shake your head.

“You’d still find a way to cheat,” you counter, and don’t say that you would, too.

Fate doesn’t deny that, he just grins; you try not to think about whether you are merely imagining a special light in the green eyes that you still don’t understand.

“I’ll have to re-learn my tricks somehow,” he says, and out of nowhere produces a deck of cards; he might not have sleeves, but he’s still grinning, a joke on himself, one that more or less falls flat.

There are holes punched in the deck’s center; the casino name printed on the box is one of the three you robbed in Zaun one night, and you remember that particular hit well enough, surprised that he had kept this souvenir at all from what had, in all honesty, been one of your better escapades. After a moment’s hesitation, you take the box, feel the places on the edges worn from age and someone running their hands across the case. But the seal is still on the white cardboard, and inside the cards are crisp, only ever touched once. In your hands, they are no different from any other deck of cards, not a weapon, or a trick. It’s up to you to shuffle them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And there we are, we're done! Again, if you spotted any egregious lore errors that aren't handwaved by this being a series of AUs, please let me know. Pointing out any grammar and spelling mistakes would also be nice, and definitely appreciated.


End file.
